What Trump said about our role in the world

During the campaign, Trump displayed instincts about foreign policy that could be cobbled together into a construct.

Trump made it clear he thought the United States was overextended globally and too quick to get into fights in which there wasn’t truly an actionable national security interest at stake. And that the United States did too much and our allies did too little in maintaining international order.

That suggested that Trump would conduct a hard-headed national-interest foreign policy. The Trump administration would advance American interests, narrowly defined. It would seek and work with allies to that end. But otherwise, other countries needed to step up to the plate.

Trump claimed that there was an actionable national security interest in retaliating against Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons. But that was just gloss.

There can be no doubt that the United States would retaliate massively against any use of chemical weapons against us. A retaliatory gesture against Assad wasn’t necessary to reinforce that point.

Syrian attack wasn't part of a larger policy

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President Donald Trump's photo, taken at Mar-a-lago resembles another well-known photo of President Barack Obama. Elizabeth Keatinge (@elizkeatinge) has more.
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Instead, this was a military intervention purely on humanitarian grounds. It is intended to deter Assad from using chemical weapons against Syrians, even though that doesn’t advance a hard-headed, narrowly-defined American interest.

Nor is the attack part of a larger strategy for Syria, the Middle East, or American relations with Assad’s enablers, Russia and Iran.

It arguably had the ancillary benefit of causing other countries to recalculate the willingness of the United States to use force under Trump compared to Barack Obama. But that didn’t drive the decision. The decision was driven by the desire to deter Assad from using chemical weapons, period.

It was a completely ad hoc decision. It felt like the right thing to do. So Trump did it. And most Americans seem to agree that it was the right thing to do.

My guess is that’s the way foreign policy is going to be conducted under Trump, a series of ad hoc decisions based on what seems right or doable at the time. At the end of the day, to borrow from Winston Churchill, there will be no theme to the pudding.

Why ad hoc might be the way to go

Trump follows two big construct presidents when it comes to foreign policy.

After 9/11, George W. Bush saw the United States as a catalyst for transforming authoritarian states in the Middle East into market-oriented democracies.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t just to chase out perceived threats. Both countries were to become exemplars for the region and a contagion for change within it.

Obama’s big construct wasn’t, as neoconservatives would have it, just to retreat from global leadership and responsibility. Obama’s construct was considerably more subtle than that.

Obama wanted to reset America’s relationship with the world to be more cooperative and respectful. The United States would continue to provide leadership. But it would operate in coordination with others, through multilateral organizations. That would result, according to Obama, in a more secure international order and greater burden sharing by other countries.

The democratic tide in the world is receding, not advancing. Afghanistan and Iraq are messes, examples of American overreach, not exemplars of good governance or the virtues of democratic capitalism. The threat of terrorism can’t be quantified, but it doesn’t seem to be abating.

Things fell apart everywhere under Obama. Cooperative multilateralism is no match for national interest realpolitik, which still governs the affairs of nation-states.

The world is a messy place. There is no clear path to navigating the Sunni-Shia competition for regional influence in the Middle East, containing Russian revanchism, coping with the rise of China, eliminating North Korea’s nuclear threat, or controlling Islamic terrorism. There’s no big construct that envelops all of this, and more.